Page 26 of Add To Hoard

He is quiet for a moment. “No.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be reporting to someone? Some council of ancient and terrible things?”

“The council is neither ancient nor terrible by my accounting.”

“But there is one.”

“There is one.”

He is watching the water run clear into the basin, the face of a man who has said something true and is waiting to see what I do with it.

“And they know I’m here.”

“They know.”

“And they have opinions about it.”

“They have opinions about everything,” he says. “It is the primary activity of councils.”

I snort before I can stop myself.

He looks at me when I do it. Directly, as he does when I do something he was not prepared for, his eyes doing that recalibration I have stopped trying to catalogue because it happens too often now and each time it is slightly different and I do not have enough categories.

I look back at him.

There is a moment. I will think about it later, on the other side of tonight, and I will not be able to say exactly when it started or what it was made of, where the distance between us has a different quality than it has had before. Not smaller. Just different. The quality of a room when the weather outside changes, the air pressure shifting without anyone having touched a window or a door.

Then the sky opens.

The storm comes in from the northwest with no meaningful warning — one moment the cloud cover is its usual heavy gray and the next the wind has found an opinion and the rain arrives not in drops but in a wall of it, cold and immediate and completely committed.

I am moving before I have decided to move.

“The bow line,” I say, already running toward the brig. “The northern anchor, if that overhang comes down in this —”

He is already at the bow line. I do not know how he covered the distance that fast and I do not have time to think about it. I go to the stern, get both hands on the rope, feel the tide pulling at the hull with the aggressive interest of water that has been given permission by weather to behave badly. The ‘Tenacious’ is moving, not loose, but straining, the lines taut and the hull rocking with the force of the swell coming around the southern rock formation.

The rain is absolute. In thirty seconds I am soaked through past sensation into a condition of existence.

“The stern line needs a second anchor,” I shout over the wind. “There’s a spur of rock twenty yards south —”

He has already seen it. He takes the coil of rope from the supply chest. I did not tell him where it was, he found it, and runs the second line to the southern spur and gets it tied off with a speed and cleanliness that I would be impressed by if I had any attention available for being impressed.

We work the beach for twenty minutes in the storm, adjusting lines and checking the hull and moving the provisions chest further into the rock shelter, and at no point does either of us give the other an order because there is no hierarchy available in this kind of weather, just two people who can both see what needs doing and do it.

When the brig is as secure as we can make it I end up in the shelter of the northern rock formation with the rain running off the basalt above us in a continuous curtain and the wind unable to reach us at this angle and the warmth of exertion still in my blood. He is beside me. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to feel the warmth that comes off him, considerable, and the rain-soaked cold of the rest of my existence is nothing with pointed interest.

We stand there in the shelter and watch the storm work the beach.

“The wedge held,” I say, looking at the overhang.

“It did.”

“Your quarter inch made the difference, did it?”

“Probably not yet,” he says. “Ask me after a worse storm than this.”

I look at him sideways. He is watching the rain and his hair is soaked and plastered dark against his neck and the scarring at his throat is wet and the silver in his hair has gone dark with water and he looks, for the first time since I met him, like something that has been rained on.